The first job of any Journal editorial ought to be to celebrate the accomplishment of the contributors included here. As you read the ten articles in this present collection, I invite you to think of the degree of scholarship involved, all directed at thinking about our relations with young children. What a tribute to the young children and practitioners who are thought about in these papers and to the wider community of early childhood and how much it matters.
Every collection of papers is fascinating in its own way and this collection is no exception. There are papers from countries as diverse as Australia, China, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. The topics reflect new issues that demand attention for example the role of artificial intelligence and digital learning, whilst including issues that are on-going themes of inquiry and understanding – risk and freedom in play; documentation, forms of assessment and quality rating scales; beliefs, values and differing models of pedagogic relationship; and the development of inclusive practice.
As an editorial hors o’euvre, to the papers themselves, let me give you a taster by grouping the papers in what I see as the five themes listed above.
Sarika Kewalramani, offers a fascinating illustration of the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to foster inquiry literacy, including, interestingly, attention to emotion. The data suggests the capacity of four- and five-year olds to express anxiety about the wellbeing of the robots. The paper makes a fascinating contribution to the debate, itself imbued with emotion, about the potential contribution of robots in early childhood pedagogy. The paper by Helen Knauf and Marion Lepold offers a counterpose to that of Sarika Kewalramani. Their research warns us of the limitations of technologies and the indispensable role of human relationship and sensitivity in ‘hearing’ what it is that a child wishes to communicate about their experience. A third valuable paper in this theme, by Katrin Schulz-Heidorf and her colleagues, compares books and apps as media for shared reading in Norwegian ECEC-institutions.
In a second theme on risk and freedom in play, Helen Lynch and her colleagues offer a fascinating study of the outdoor play of six- to eight-year olds in rural Ireland. They show children’s strong desire to engage in risky play despite adults’ anxiety and efforts to restrict risk. Pleasingly, the children also took the risk of incurring adult disapproval in their activity risks! One can sympathise with the adults who, in a risk averse context, and where punitive responses are likely if a child is even mildly hurt, seek to limit their own risks. One wonders though how much the level of restrictions, and the possibility of injury, have been openly discussed between practitioners themselves and between practitioners and parents. Is it fair to expect practitioners to be more responsive to children’s desire to engage in risk if they have not had the opportunity to engage in possibly contentious discussions about what is acceptable?
Two papers fall into a third theme concerned with assessment and quality rating.
Josefine Jahreie offers a comparative study of Danish and Norwegian teachers’ views on the language assessment of minority language children. The teachers all expressed degrees of ambivalance towards the notion of school readiness, teacher autonomy and discretion, and to official objectives of integration of children and what this may mean in practice. The data shows how carefully the teachers struggled with these particular ambivalences and the depth of their conflicted feelings. Once again, the role of emotion and the management of conflict in pedagogic thinking is highlighted. Early childhood pedagogy is not a technocratic activity that can be determined by positivist research. It is a field full of complexity, dilemmas, and debates, underpinned by contested values and confusing emotions. This paper illustrates how much an early childhood pedagogy that is to be democraticallty sensitive and responsive to local communities, requires a safe space. By such a space, I mean one where pedagogues can talk and think together, with critical and holistic attention to the accompanying emotions evoked by the day to day work and by the very processes of discussing this work.
On quality rating, Rachel Jones and her colleagues examine the MOVERS scale, an assessment tool for rating the physical domain of early child development. The work of this research team raises the fascinating question of why so little work has been done on instruments to assess physical movement when movement is perhaps one of the most animated aspects of early childhood development. I am thinking especially here of the vitality of babies when able to sit up and turn their heads for a much wider visual perspective than was available lying down. Or how important, in the second half of the first year, is the capacity of babies and toddlers to explore whilst also being able to return at will (and speed) to those perceived as protectors!
In my fourth theme on beliefs, values and differing models of pedagogic relationship, Jie Zhu and her colleagues discuss the beliefs and practices of Chinese early years mathematics’ teachers. These researchers report teachers’ views on the effectiveness of different pedagogic relationships and propose how traditional and cultural beliefs may nonetheless remain influential. Elizabeth Rouse and her colleagues also present work on relationships in learning, this time focussed on professionals, working in preschool and in compulsory school, talking together about how children can best be enabled to manage this transition. These authors also show how it is not only the children who have a gap to bridge. The professionals also face challenges in crossing professional boundaries and understanding the ‘other’.
In the fifth theme on inclusion, Jessica Roberts and Patsy Callaghan explore the implementation of an inclusion model in Ireland. Whilst commitment to inclusion amongst their participants is evident, there were again many barriers, not least the low take-up of training. There could of course be many reasons why training is not taken up. However, their work on the factors that may determine the effective implementation of any policy or practice, once again raises vital and valuable questions. These include questions about the quality of training, how pedagogues engage with it, and the gap between what practitioners feel they can say in front of colleagues, and what they may feel or think privately.
These five themes cover nine papers. What about the tenth, by Lena Hansen and her colleagues addressing questions about the processes of the natural sciences. These researchers explore what we understand by ‘science’ as an activity and the need for young children to be critically engaged in questioning ‘forms of knowing’. I thought that this paper contained a powerful message that ran through all the papers.
Perhaps one of the most contested areas of human discourse, especially in ECEC, is on the nature of evidence and scientific inquiry. The phrase ‘evidence- based practice’ appears on numerous occasions in diverse debates and documents. Critical inquiry into the philosophy of what counts as evidence and its generation is fundamental. How wonderful is this paper therefore, with its central question of ‘how do we know this?’. It gives democratic value to different forms and sources of knowing and the respect that each is owed. The paper offers a challenge to the other nine and to all of us as researchers and practitioners. As Michel Vandenbroeck argued, in his keynote at the EECERA conference in Bologna in 2017, what counts as evidence (and what evidence counts!) is not value free and needs highly critical examination. Underpinning all research are questions of beliefs and values, and that is as true of the papers in this Edition as it is of all research.
Taken individually, these ten papers offer a real contribution to scholarly knowledge in the field of early childhood and I want to celebrate that. However, taken together, I think they add up to much more. In their own ways, they all expose questions of difference – different beliefs, values, priority. Peter Moss and many other writers have argued that early years practitioners are not technicians engaging with young children in ways tightly specified by ‘best evidence’, as if this was an objective source! The early childhood institution is a community, itself embedded in many interacting social and cultural contexts, embracing many different belief systems and perspectives. These will be present and influential whether declared or hidden. They are present in the papers in this Edition just as much as they are present in the work of all of us.
So as well as expressing gratitude to the individual authors for their scholarship, I wish to also express gratitude for the collective message of these papers. Personally, I have taken the collection as a reminder to hear each other’s voices authentically, whether in research or in practice, and to adopt states of mind that embrace difference, complexity and uncertainty. This is no small ask! It is not easy to be unsure or to disagree openly. However, I think it is our collective capacity to stay with such difficult states of mind, resisting the rush to consensus and superficial agreement, that is a vital message and at the heart of a lively, developing field of early childhood practice and scholarship.
Peter’s latest paper, with Dilys Wilson, is Peter Elfer & Dilys Wilson (2021) Talking with feeling: using Bion to theorise ‘Work Discussion’ as a model of professional reflection with nursery practitioners’. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681366.2021.1895290